A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

If you've read Antick Musings much at all, you know that I'm fond of widgets. And who wouldn't be? They actually do stuff -- sometimes even useful stuff -- and they're called widgets.

So I was thrilled to see in my e-mail this morning that my employer, the mighty house of Wiley, has created a widget for linking to our books. "But, Andy," you might say, "other publishers have done this before, so it's no big deal."

Ah, but are those publishers global? I bet they aren't. Nearly everything Wiley publishes is available everywhere in the world, and so our landing page detects where a user is, and lists bookselling options local to that user. Can your other publishers say as much?

Anyway, the main point of these is to allow authors to post nice little snippets of code on their webpages to show off their books, but there's no reason that only authors can get into the act. If you're enamored of Applied Polymer Rheology, show your love!

For example, here's a book I've worked on, which I think is both deeply neat and underloved:

All you need to create a widget of your very own is a Wiley ISBN and this here website. Go on, it's fun!